We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. Albert Bates, author of The Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

There is this funny little Facebook app that summarizes one's year in a handful of selected photos. At first we ignored it, but then we liked some of the albums we were sent by friends, so we made one ourselves. The limitations of the medium quickly became apparent.How can we summarize the past 12 months of one human life in 12-16 photos? And what about the two new books we published, the dozens of essays, the seeming quixotic but intensely rewarding research, the mentoring of bright new talents, or the lovely blossoming of friendships, new and old? James Gleick said, “Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought." If that is true, our evolution is now being hijacked by Facebook and Twitter, a form of cultural lobotomy — the truncation of elegant, poetic, ineffable life passages into 140 characters.We thought it might be nice to close the year with an album of a different kind. Instead of measuring our outputs, we decided to have a look at the new inputs we tapped. We began a review of some of our favorite books, films and performances of 2014. Then, as we started to list them, it quickly became unmanageable. For instance, there were at least 85 books that we can remember getting through at least in part during this past year. The number of films and TV series has to be at least that long. We can recall binge watching entire seasons of some clever series in a couple days, downloading them from the web. At least we didn't go to many conferences, but the total number of inspired speakers we heard, or later watched via web links, is larger than both of the other categories.

To keep this to a manageable length – precisely the kind of truncation we just complained of - what we have assembled is just our tops in class for each of those three categories. We live in a rural ecovillage and do not have ready access to the art theatres, galleries, dance studios, off-broadway, or many other cultural crosscurrents enjoyed by our city cousins, or these lists might have been much better. We like to think our enjoyment of the daily display put on by the natural world more than makes up for any cultural privations.Best Book: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth KolbertWhile we have seen some of this before in the pages of The New Yorker and love her previous Field Notes from a Catastrophe, the 336-page Sixth Extinction was hard to set down. Kolbert is one of the best science writers alive today, and her final insights were disturbing even for confirmed doomers such as ourselves. Also ran:Just Kids by Patti Smith. A touching memoir we read on our annual dugout canoe journey upriver in Belize. Still amazed at the depth of detail, and in awe of Patti Smith's journaling skills in her raw youth.Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda JetháThis book came out in 2010 and it has generated a lot of controversy. Everyone should read it to better understand how cultural biases have been perverting our better natures.Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health by William DavisThis is not memorable wordsmithing and it is even more controversial than Sex at Dawn, but it changed our life by changing what we eat. See too: David Perlmutter, Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar--Your Brain's Silent KillersThe Man Who Quit Money by William SundeenThe central character is not as admirable as the title might suggest, but this non-fiction chronicle is top notch. Some day we may all find ourselves in similar situations, sans volition.The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. "In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.” “We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.” “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” Books best avoided:Arcadia by Lauren GroffBossypants by Tina FeyLean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi KleinTop Conference Presentation:Global Oil Market Forecasting: Main Approaches & Key Drivers by Steven Kopits, Managing Director, Douglas-Westwood at Columbia SIPA: CGEP, Center on Global Energy Policy, February 2014. In the showdown between earth and economy, Mother Nature bats last. Also rans:Biodiversity for a Livable Climatein Massachusetts. Watch the whole thing. If we have to pick one standout, it would be Larry Kopald, Co-Founder and President of The Carbon Underground, speaking on the tipping points of viral memes (embed below).Savory Institute's Annual International Conference in London. Watch the available videos while they are still outside the Savory paywall. Best of breed: Elaine Ingham, Darren Doherty.Age of Limits Dennis Meadows doesn't accept many invitations to speak these days, but he came out for the Age of Limits conference in Pennsylvania and, as usual, he dazzled. Earlier video link here: http://energyskeptic.com/2014/dennis-meadows-collapse-is-inevitable-now-2015-2020/Best avoided: COP-20 Lima, and anything with the word "Sustainable" in the title.Films and TV:Our favorite: Shameless on Showtime This is cinema verité at its pinnacle: dirty, dark, contemporary, biting. Collapse has already arrived. Most USAnians don't get to see it unless they look under the rug. This series gets it, with delicious humor.Also rans:America's Darling (PBS)Boom Bust (RT)Boss (Starz)Game of Thrones (HBO)Homeland (Showtime)House of Cards (Netflix)Keiser Report (RT)Lilyhammer (Netflix)Lucy (EuropaCorp) Mad Men (AMC)Masters of Sex (Showtime)Nixon's The One (YouTube)Silicon Valley (HBO)The Geoff Lawton Permaculture Design Course series (Vimeo)The Good Wife (CBS)The Honourable Woman (Sundance)The Newsroom (HBO)The Trews (YouTube)The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount)Transcendence (Warner Brothers) True Detective (HBO)Avoid:Madam Secretary - A drama about the personal and professional life of a Hillary Clinton character as she tries to balance her work and family life. Flogging for Drone Wars, the CIA and Gitmo. Téa Leoni, have you no shame? (CBS)

True Blood – The bayou vampire classic, now too formulaic in its old age, would have been merciful to end a couple seasons earlier. (Showtime)

Walking Dead (AMC, same problem).24 (Fox) "Every week, Jack Bauer saves civilization by torturing someone, and it works." - Senator Angus King, of Maine.Finally, as we are often called upon to write cover blurbs, here is the best of that lot from 2014, actually a book review, penned by Sam Anderson, critic at large for The New York Times Magazine:

“Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)”

Sunday, December 21, 2014

As more and more research is devoted to biochar we confirm again and again that it is both miraculous as a climate-change arresting store of organic carbon and as a nutrient densifier in organic and biodynamic gardening. Climate-wise, it has the potential to take us back to something more hospitable than what is now in store for us. It also has the potential to multiply our stores of nutrient dense foods. And lately we've learned something else — the power of biochar as a nonalcoholic digestif.

The use of charcoal in cooking extends back into prehistory — beyond the horizon of our earliest known civilizations — but paleoclimatology tells us that when organized societies scaled up their charcoal production — making lime for the monumental architecture of the Aztec Triple Alliance, for instance — they all too often wreaked havoc on both forest and sky to such an extent that it led to their own precipitous decline and outmigration.

We don't know when the discovery of the gastric benefits of charcoal first arrived, but it may have come from the observation of the habits of animals, such as Red colobus monkeys in Africa, who improve their diet by seeking out char from the forest floor after wildfires, enabling them to relieve the indigestion caused by toxins in some leafy greens.

Other monkeys experience bouts of diarrhea brought on by parasites and viruses. The bonnet macaques of Southern India have taken to eating dirt from termite mounds. Why eat dirt from termite mounds? The dirt contains kaolin minerals, the same ingredient found in over the counter anti-diarrheics such as Kaopectate. Rhesus macaques also partake in geophagy, the eating of dirt, for the same reasons. Clay also contains kaolin, and the rhesus macaques take extra care to only ingest clay-rich soils.

— Nature: Clever Monkeys (PBS 2011)

Mother monkeys teach their young to do this, as indeed our own ancestors may have taught their young, even before we had speech and flint tools.

Of course not all charcoal is biochar and not all biochar is the same. Bone black is the carbonaceous residue obtained from the dry distillation of bones. It contains 80 percent calcium and magnesium phosphates and other inorganic material; the slow-pyrolysis resistant minerals originally present in the animal bone tissue. Charred animal manure will be high in nitrogen and potassium. Activated charcoal — created by steam treatment of charcoal to enhance the absorptive capacity of the micropores — is what most ambulances, ERs and rural clinics use to treat poisonings.

It may have been our ancient taste for charcoal that coded a segment of our taste receptors to favor foods cooked over glowing embers. Consider the popularity of the Hawaiian luau, Indian tandoor, Brazilian rodizio, Colombian lomo al trapo, Argentinian parallada, Japanese yakitori, and Indonesian satay. In Thailand and Korea, they use a small tabletop charcoal hibachi for thinly sliced meat and vegetables. While you cook, the meat and juices drip down into the second chamber, making the meat low in fat and giving you a rich broth to use as a soup or a savory sauce. Both meat and broth contain traces of biochar.

Banquet scene: Ur 2600 BCE

We have previously written in this space about the applications of biochar in animal husbandry, from improving the fermentation of silage and sweetening the smell of a barn to reducing the need for antibiotics by naturally aiding the ability of cattle to cleanse their intestinal tracts of pathogens. It should come as no surprise that biochar improves human digestion in exactly the same way, by partnering with our own, unique, beneficial, essential gastrointestinal microbiome to stimulate phage immunogenicity, fight off infection antigens and reverse toxin-loading. Improving the gastrointestinal flora diversity doesn't just help us fight disease; it aids immunomodulatory activity of phages such as phagocytosis and the respiratory burst of phagocytic cells, the production of cytokines, and the generation of antibodies on standby.

This Christmas and Chanukah we would like to offer a few recipes as a gift to those wee beasties in our gut lining that have been silently (and sometimes not so silently) helping us all year long.

Our holiday dinner will not follow any of the traditions we ourselves grew up with on snowy mornings in Wilton, Connecticut. There will be no stuffed turkey, cranberry jelly, buiscuits or mashed potatoes with giblet gravy, although for those who can source free-range, antibiotic-free turkeys from a local farmer and have that desire, please go ahead.

Nor will we follow our usual tradition at The Farm of a hickory smoked seitan roast, recorded in our mother's now-classic Cooking with Gluten and Seitan (1993).

After co-teaching permaculture courses with Nicole Foss and at her recommendation absorbing Wheat Belly and Grain Brain, and then sorting through the scientific controversy those books stirred, still swirling around neurochemistry frontiers in peer-reviewed literature, we are going to take a pass on the seitan roast, thank you very much.

Instead, we shall prepare this year a traditional feast from the Holy Land, augmented with biochar as a flavor enhancer and digestif. Today is 29th of Kislev, 5775 on the Jewish calendar. Perhaps there was a bit of biochar in the candlelit Chanukah supper 5775 years ago.

There are about 200,000 Christians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza who mark these holy days by the Western Catholic calendar on Dec. 4. In Bethlehem, families often cook more than a kilo of wheat for the occasion, well exceeding what a single household can eat. From the wheat berries they make a burbara porridge to share with both Christian and Muslim neighbors. A family burbara pot may last a full week.

We propose to prepare a wheat-free burbara, using a mix of organic yellow cornmeal, stone-cut oatmeal, hempseed meal and flaxseed meal, and, of course, biochar.

Departing just a little from the Holy Land, we plan our burbara to be accompanied by a Cuban piccadillo, in honor of the Christmas deal struck between Obama and Castro, at the urging of Pope Francis, to normalize relations. We will begin with a small appetizer of soup, then the piccadillo and burbara, with buttered brussel sprouts on the side, as our entrée. That is likely the most filling part of the meal, so what follows will be lighter, in the tradition of a hot, desert climate: side plates of fatayer, celery, carrots, pear tomatoes, sliced cucumbers, broccoli florets, sliced yellow squash, shiitake pickles and baba ghannouj, with scintillating conversation among family, neighbors and friends. Dessert will be stuffed dates — the perfect company for tea or coffee.

And while we sip our demitasse, we might just let it slip that we are doing a wonderful crowdsource funding campaign for our favorite project at The Farm this year, #The Hippies Were Right.

Preparing biochar for food:

When making food-grade biochar, we generally select for our substrate a woody-stemmed plant such as bamboo, vetiver, miscanthus, rice hulls, cacao pods, or coconut shells. We would probably not want to use poultry or other animal manures, soldier fly larvae, offal or bones, less because of any latent toxicity than because of the thought of what you are eating when it arrives at the table.

We fine-grind the char, using a coffee grinder at the last stage, reducing it to a fine, feathery powder. This will form the basis for each use in the recipes that follow.

Last year we took a wonderful fermentation intensive with Sandor Katz and later invited him to co-teach a workshop at The Farm called "Fermaculture" — Fermentation and Permaculture. Sandor introduced us to Michael Pollan's excellent book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation and that in turn introduced us to the fine art of mirepoix, sofrito, battuto, and other humble beginnings.

Sofrito is a Spanish mixture of onion, garlic, and tomatoes gently sautéed in a slick of olive oil. It is called soffritto in Italy, where parsley leaves and fennel, or sometimes finely diced cured meats like pancetta or prosciutto scraps can find their way into the mix. The Polish włoszczyzna — translation: "Italian stuff"— is soffritto.

Mirepoix (onion, carrot, celery) in France, suppengrün (carrot, celeriac, leek) in Germany, and most Cajun bayou cooking (onion, celery, green bell pepper), along with almost every cuisine in the world start with a common simple, balanced, vegetable base in a slow simmering stew.

"Homely in the best sense," Pollan writes, "pot dishes are about marrying lots of prosaic little things rather than elevating one big thing. In fact, it is the precise combination of these chopped-up plants that usually gives a pot dish its characteristic flavor and cultural identity." Cuban sofrito tends to taste more like the creole, while Ecuadorians begin a meal with sofritos of freshly toasted cumin, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and sweet cubanelle peppers. In Puerto Rico its known as recaíto, where culantro leaves are minced down to confetti size and joined by ajices dulces.

The secret is the slow breakdown of the long protein chains of the vegies into amino acids that activate your flavonoid sensors and confer umami. These will enliven the taste of almost anything.

Season to taste with salt and pepper, stir in lemon juice, dash of olive oil and parsley, garnish with sprinkle of biochar and serve.Cuban PiccadilloServes 4 to 6

Many people who have yet to visit Cuba assume that the birthplace of the Habanero pepper will be a center of hot cuisine. While Havana sports many trendy restaurants and night clubs, spicy foods are not something most Cubans prefer. Salt, pepper, garlic and onion are about as hot as it usually gets.

Remove cover and season to taste with salt and pepper and garnish with biochar. Remove and discard bay leaves. Serve with half the steamed rice garnished with biochar. Reserve the other half of the rice for the Fatayer.

Burbara:Fill a 3-quart saucepan with water and salt and bring to a boil, slowly whisking in the four grain meals. Simmer at medium heat, stirring with wood spoon until mixture starts to thicken. Stir in vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon sticks and reserved syrup reduction. Lower heat and stir until porridge is thick and creamy. Remove cinnamon sticks and pour into bowls. Garnish with chickpea flour, ground coconut, and candied anise and fennel seeds, and biochar.Biochar Middle Eastern PlatesServes 4-6

Despite what your Uncle Harry tells you, Christmas is observed in most Middle Eastern countries. Saudi Arabia currently has a ban on any other religion besides Islam but Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria have lots of Christians. This plate is made of many of the delicacies you will find at Christmas dinner in the Holy Land. Most of the ingredients can be grown in four season greenhouses anywhere.Biochar Ghannouj Serves 4-6Ingredients1 large eggplant1 clove garlic1/4 - 1/2 c lemon juice (depending on taste)3 Tbsp tahini1 tsp salt3 tsp olive oil

Garnish2 Tbsp lemon juice2 tsp olive oil1 tsp biochar

PreparationPreheat oven to 375 degrees and bake eggplant for 30 minutes, or until outside is crisp and inside is soft. Allow to cool for 20 minutes. Cut open and scoop out the flesh into colander and allow to drain for 10 minutes. Removing the excess liquid helps to eliminate a bitter flavor. Place eggplant flesh in a medium bowl. Add remaining ingredients and mash together. You can also use a food processor instead of by hand and pulse for about 2 minutes. Place in serving bowl and top with biochar, lemon juice and olive oil. Add other garnishes, such as pine nuts and red pepper, according to taste and local availability.

In a medium bowl, combine rice and salt. Add oil and mash. Once oil is absorbed, add 1/4 c warm water. Knead into an elastic dough and form into balls.

Wash spinach and soak in salted water while you chop onion and walnuts. Rinse spinach and dry thoroughly with paper towel. Combine and toss filling ingredients. Place 2 teaspoons of filling in the center of each ball of dough. Cover filling with dough and form into triangular shape. Dip dough triangles in biochar. Bake for 10-15 minutes on greased baking sheet, until golden brown. Allow to cool 5 minutes before serving.Other Offerings:

Steamed Brussels Sprouts

The classic method of steaming uses a steamer basket or insert. Bring about an inch of water to a boil in the bottom of a pot into which your steamer basket or insert fits. Put trimmed and cleaned brussels sprouts in the steamer basket, set over the boiling water, cover, and steam until tender to the bite, about 5 minutes.

Alternatively, bring a scant 1/2 inch salted water to boil in a large frying pan or saute pan. Add brussels sprouts, cover, and cook until sprouts are tender to the bite and water has evaporated, about 5 minutes (depending on how crisp you like your cooked sprouts).

Serve with melted butter for dipping, shaker of salt and grinder for pepper.

Biochar Shiitake Pickles

We started experimenting with this right after we had harvested the last of our summer eggplant and hard rains brought us a bounty of fall shiitake. We finished making the eggplant pickles as planned, following our mother's recipe from The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, and then we made shiitake pickles the same way, but adding a sprinkling of biochar to the ferment.

Ingredients2 lbs shiitake mushrooms and a few sprigs of fresh thyme, rosemary and sage1 qt cider or white wine vinegar2 Tbsp pickling salt 1 Tbsp biochar2 c extra-virgin olive oil 5 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced3 jalapeño peppers 1 fresh chili habañero, deseeded and chopped finelySprigs of fresh thyme, rosemary and sage PreparationWash and stem the mushrooms and slice them across the cap in strips. Place in a mixing bowl, layering in 2 Tbsp of pickling salt and 1 Tbsp of biochar and a few sprigs of fresh thyme, rosemary and sage as you go. Compress under weight overnight. This will bring a salty brine to the surface that submerges the mushrooms.

The next day, prepare sterilized pickling jars and have them at the ready.

Drain off the brine. If you prefer reduced sodium in your diet, briefly rinse the mushrooms in a colander but try not to rinse away the herbs and biochar. Sauté the mushrooms in a wok of preheated olive oil, adding sliced garlic and chilies, about 5 minutes or until the mushrooms and garlic begin to brown. Remove the mushrooms, peppers and garlic and immerse in a bowl filled with vinegar. Place the hot mushrooms and pickling marinade into the sterilized jars, filling them to the very top. Cover completely with the marinade and put the lids on tightly. Put the jars aside until they're cool. Clean the jars, attach sticky labels and write the date and the contents on them. Store the jars somewhere cool and dark - it's best to leave them for about 2 weeks before opening so the vegetables really get to marinate well, but if you absolutely cannot wait, you can eat them sooner. They'll keep for about 3 months.

Dessert: Stuffed Dates with BiocharServes 4-6

Ingredients1/2 c butter or margarine such as Earth Balance2 c powdered sugar1/4 tsp vanilla extract1 Tbsp rice or almond milk (or more, as needed)15 pitted dates15 toasted almonds or pecansPowdered sugar for dusting1 tsp biochar PreparationFilling:Beat together the butter or margarine, vanilla extract, and 1 cup of the powdered sugar until they are well mixed. Slowly add remaining powdered sugar until all is mixed in. Continue to beat with mixer and add rice milk a little bit at a time until frosting is smooth and fluffy.

Dates:Stuff dates with one toasted almond or pecan per date. Roll in powdered sugar. Place on greased wax paper in the refrigerator until ready to serve. Serve stuffed dates with dusting of biochar and powdered sugar, and coffee or tea. Happy Holidays!

Sunday, December 14, 2014

It is wholly appropriate that the 20th UN climate change conference (#COP20) met in the Peruvian army headquarters, known as "El Pentagonito," where former Presidente Alberto Fujimori liked to torture and interrogate his political prisoners. Peru is now the world’s fourth most dangerous country for environmental defenders — 57 activists have been assassinated, four in September alone. Assassination is another useful word to describe what is happening to the climate. But the climate conference has its own style of torture, much of it involving sleep deprivation and stress positions.

This COP had just one goal, which was to "finalize" an ambitious international agreement that will be watered down in Paris this time next year. "No Lima, No Paris" was the slogan going in, two weeks ago. Towards the end, after listening to days of hand-wringing speeches recalling the disaster at Copenhagen, the delegates found themselves at impasse.

Going into the final sessions, the draft Decision document tried to express that impasse in positive, if tortured, language.

Draft decision -/CP.20 Further advancing the Durban Platform, Recommendation of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action…Noting with grave concern the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C or 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels … [the COP:]

1. Confirms that the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action shall complete the work … as early as possible in order for the Conference of the Parties at its twenty-first session (November- December 2015) to adopt a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties;2. Decides that the protocol… shall address, inter alia, mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology development and transfer, capacity-building and transparency of action and support in a balanced manner;3. Urges developed country Parties to provide and mobilize support to developing country Parties for ambitious mitigation and adaptation actions, especially to Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change; and invites other Parties willing to do so to complement such support;

***

12. Decides that all Parties shall, in the context of their intended nationally determined contributions and in order to facilitate clarity, transparency and understanding, provide information on the reference point (including, as appropriate, a base year), time frames and/or periods for implementation, scope and coverage, planning processes, assumptions and methodological approaches including those for estimating and accounting for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and, as appropriate, removals, and how the Party considers that its intended nationally determined contribution is fair and ambitious, in light of its national circumstances, and how it contributes towards achieving the objective of the Convention as set out in its Article 2;

***16. Encourages all Parties to the Kyoto Protocol to ratify and implement the Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol;17. Decides to accelerate the implementation of decision 1/CP.19, paragraphs 3 and 4, by convening a forum to be held in conjunction with the forty-fourth sessions (May 2016) and the forty-sixth sessions (May 2017) of the subsidiary bodies and invites all Parties to participate in the forum in order to:(a) Be informed by the status of implementation of the institutional arrangements under the Convention;(b) Assess the need to mobilize financial resources, technological support and capacity-building support to enable developing country Parties to implement their nationally appropriate mitigation actions;(c) Review the progress made in the technical examination of good practice policies, technologies, financial arrangements and options to enhance pre-2020 ambition;(d) Facilitate the coherence of the work of the Convention bodies relevant to the implementation of pre-2020 climate action;18. Also decides to continue the technical examination of opportunities with high mitigation potential, including those with adaptation, health and sustainable development co-benefits, in the period 2015–2020, by requesting the secretariat to:(a) Organize a series of in-session technical expert meetings which:(i) Facilitate Parties in the identification of policy options, practices and technologies and in planning for their implementation in accordance with nationally defined development priorities;(ii) Build on and utilize the related activities of, and further enhance collaboration and synergies among, the Technology Executive Committee, theClimate Technology Centre and Network, the Durban Forum on capacity-building, the Executive Board of the clean development mechanism and the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism;(iii) Build on previous technical expert meetings in order to hone and focus on actionable policy options;(iv) Provide meaningful and regular opportunities for the effective engagement of experts from Parties, relevant international organizations, civil society, indigenous peoples, women, youth, academic institutions, the private sector, and subnational authorities nominated by their respective countries;(v) Support the accelerated implementation of policy options and enhanced mitigation action, including through international cooperation;

Those were some excerpts from the draft presented for comments at the Saturday morning Plenary after a negotiating session the night before that went until 3.30am. At first it looked a lot like the recent debate in the US Congress over the government shutdown bill — it had enough foul play in it to alienate both rabid Teabaggers and spreadsheet Democrats but in the end it squeaked through, averting another billion-dollar-wasting government furlough. Senator Elizabeth Warren, noting that bankster toadies had written the section repealing essential parts of Dodd-Frank banking reform, observed that just that one corporation, Citibank, is now large enough to hold the whole country for ransom.

The debate over the UN draft coalesced around a similar divide in the political philosophies that have bedeviled the world for the past four or more centuries. At issue was whether to consider the world's entire population, and by extension the whole planet, as a single family.

On one pole are Jeffersonians. These are the people who apparently were given an adequate sense of security as children, with loving family environments and kindly potty training. Jeffersonians think it would be a good idea to try to raise everyone to a level of equal opportunity, even if that means small sacrifices by those of noble birth. In the US, these people voted for Obama, want immigration and medical system reform, and detest what is happening in Palestine. At the UN this is the Africa Group, the Island Nations and the G77, who keep pushing for common but differentiated action, technology development and transfer, capacity-building and transparency of actions under a legally-binding regime.

On the other pole are the Hamiltonians. These are the people who keep chanting about "family values" because when growing up they were brutalized and now they do the same for their children to teach them that the world is unfair and everyone has to look out for number one. Their DNA compels them towards herd behavior, but rather than seeing the whole world as their herd, they see only those who wear Harvard ties and clawed their way into the one percent. In their minds, they must vigilantly hold their hard-earned privileges against the tide of mud people that threaten to sully their guest room linens. In the US, these people voted for Romney, want to cut off immigration and cancel Obamacare, and support Israel, right or wrong. At the UN, Hamiltonians include the US, Israel, Australia, Belize, Canada, UK, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands.

China went into the COP intending to join the Hamiltonians but in the end switched sides and joined the Jeffersonians, which created a bit of a stir.

The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage is a good example of the snares that pop up whenever Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians try to walk a path together, reaching out and holding hands, all Kumbaya, as it were. "Loss and Damage" is a UN buzzword that symbolizes, for the Jeffersonians, an opportunity to undo the historic climate debt incurred by the rich countries in the process of burning through several hundred million years of fossil sunlight in order to become richer than Croesus.

The Hamiltonians, apart from Scandinavia and Germany, do not even acknowledge climate debt. Such a concept! "Where was the intention?" a US negotiator asked Amy Goodman. It is the US position that dredging up history, harkening back to an era when everyone thought differently about resources and class systems, is futile and that we should just look forward. Given Obama's remarks this past week on the zero possibility of prosecutions for torture, that kind of advice coming from the US has a particularly hollow ring.

Yet, this small philosophical difference has become such a serious stumbling block that it threatens to derail otherwise remarkable progress. As Jamie Henn of 350.org told Democracy Now!:

"One of the most interesting things that’s happening in the text right now is discussions about this long-term goal of where this treaty is really headed. In the past, it’s just been put in, in terms of temperature targets or percentage reductions. Now, for the first time, delegates are really talking seriously about phasing out fossil fuels completely by 2050 and going to zero carbon emissions. That’s the type of target that begins to push this process into the realm of reality and begins to get more people potentially engaged to be seeing this process for what it is, which is really a showdown with the fossil fuel industry."

This new frame of "ending fossil fuels" is important for a number of reasons:

1) It strengthens the carbon bubble argument: The "carbon bubble" refers to the idea that fossil fuel companies are dramatically overvalued because their financial worth is based on their ability to turn their coal, oil and gas reserves into profit, and 80% of those reserves will need to stay underground if the world aims to keep global warming below 2°C. The fossil fuel industry has argued that the carbon bubble isn't real because governments aren't serious about their commitment to 2°C. Seeing goals like "zero emissions" in the Lima text are clearly making the industry — and their investors — nervous. Just today, a well known Australian columnist wrote in the Business Spectator that many fossil fuel assets could end up stranded. As investors turn away from the fossil fuel industry, it not only opens up the space for political leaders to act, but starts to directly move the economy in the direction we need.

2) It builds the case for fossil fuel divestment: As the reality of the carbon bubble becomes more mainstream, it strengthens the financial case for fossil fuel divestment. Big investors like the Bank of England, for example, are suddenly analyzing their investments for their exposure to this carbon risk. By framing the global climate effort as a battle with the fossil fuel industry, the climate talks also help strengthen the political and moral case for divestment. Earlier this week, a group of Catholic bishops from around the world said that the world must get off fossil fuels by 2050 in order to protect the world's poor from climate change. It doesn't get more moral than that.

View from the front of the room

3) It highlights the importance of iconic fossil fuel fights: Fancy words are only as good as the real commitments that back them up, of course. As Bill McKibben wrote in the Guardian this morning, the real test of whether countries like the US and Australia are serious about their commitments is if they're willing to shelve big fossil fuel projects like Keystone XL and the Galilee Basin coal mine. When he visits the climate talks in Lima, Secretary Kerry will be coming under pressure to reject Keystone XL. If the goal is phasing out emissions, it makes no sense to invest in major new fossil projects.

4) It could turn the Paris climate talks into a movement moment: Many people and organizations in the climate movement are skeptical about the importance of the UN climate process. After all, the talks have been going on for decades and have little to show in terms of concrete progress. Lots of groups are still hung over from the blowout in Copenhagen, where much of the movement threw itself into the fight for a "fair, ambitious and binding" treaty only to walk away burned. While the chances of Paris being a transformative policy moment remain low, they could become a transformative political moment if the talks continue be framed as a battle against the fossil fuel industry. If people get the sense that the fate of the fossil fuel industry is being determined in the streets of Paris, they could turn out in force.

Australia’s far right government loves coal — it’s pretty much all they talk about. Its approval of the project can be taken for granted (though polling shows approval of the government itself is another issue, and that Aussies are turning restive at its fanaticism). But building out the ports and railways and giant pits will require huge sums of capital, and so it tests the resolve of the world’s financial system to come to terms with climate.

Any bank that backs this ludicrous plan is announcing, quite plainly, that it cares nothing about climate change. It’s also — probably worse for a bank — announcing that it’s stuck in the 19th century. Serious financial authorities (the governor of the Bank of England most recently) are warning that fossil fuel reserves risk becoming “stranded assets” as the world acts on climate change — investors in the tar sands, for instance, have already taken an enormous hit, and coal stocks have been tumbling for years. A British cabinet minister warned the other day that they were the “subprime assets of the future”, a sobering warning for everyone still recovering from the housing bust of 2008.

Die-in or sheer exhaustion?

The final negotiating session Saturday morning was lively, with Singapore contrasting the draft document to circumcision and warning that vetoing it would amount to amputation. New Zealand said the draft had "dead rats we all will have to swallow." The problem most countries had was not the rats they had to swallow but the ones that got away. Noticeably absent from the document were "differentiation" and "loss and damage."

Differentiation is a basic principle of the UNFCCC process, wherein everyone makes some sacrifice, but those with the most sacrifice more than those with the least. Loss and damage assumes that those who are most able should assist those who will suffer most, less because they bear greatest responsibility for causing the damage than because they are better able by virtue of less vulnerability or greater accumulations of world resources, industry and technology. It is logical but trips over those multicentury-old snares we mentioned.

In its floor intervention, Malaysia linked the legacies of colonialism to the deletion of differentiation and loss and damage from the draft text. "Many of you colonized us so we started at a very different point... This is why we have differentiation."

Brazil said that differentiation was not optional but already in the fabric of UNFCCC treaty law, and because of that whether it was actually mentioned in the document was irrelevant.

After the contentious overtime plenary on Saturday morning, the chair suspended the process to allow for one-on-one meetings with each block of stakeholders. This consumed the rest of the day but produced a "consensus document," that was printed and distributed at 5 minutes to midnight at a reconvened plenary. The plenary was then recessed again, for a little over an hour, to allow time for all delegates to read through the revisions and prepare 3-minute interventions.

In response to the dead rat issue raised earlier in the day, the new version was a bit more responsive to the various calls for further action. So, for instance, the preamble affirmed "its determination to strengthen adaptation action," welcomed "the progress made towards Loss and Damage," and inserted after the 2d paragraph:

3. Underscores its commitment to reaching an ambitious agreement in 2015 that reflects the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances;

— FCCC/CP/2014/L.14

Add caption

1:20 AM in the COP-20 Plenary

That can be considered a win for the developing world, especially India which has a very ambitious plan to "get to Sweden" with hundreds of additional coal plants, and only thereafter to begin cutting its own emissions. "We got what we wanted," a smiling Prakash Javadekar (India's Minister for Environment, Forest & Climate Change) gushed to Reuters' Alister Doyle.

At 1:20AM today, the COP President reconvened the plenary and having already sounded out the delegations asked if there were objections, and hearing none, declared the "Lima Call For Climate Action" ("Llamamiento de Lima para la Acción sobre el Clima") adopted, to standing ovation.

Unsaid and unexamined are some key assumptions by both the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians. For instance, both seem to assume that development by economic expansion (debt) and resource consumption is the natural course of human progress, that capitalistic, market-driven stimulus is the best way to accomplish that, and that given enough time and technology even the world's poorest nations will eventually "get to Sweden."

In this sense, the Hamiltonians, with whom we often disagree, seem to have a rare justification for their views, although they would never admit it. They can see as easily as we can that if population growth were extended another century, not only would developing countries like India and China never be able to cope with their ever-rising tide of human demands for more, and unleash unprecedented waves of migrants, but oceans would be drained of all edible fish, forests taken down to make burger meat and its paper wrap, and Mother Nature in her anger would likely extinguish the lot of us long before anyone makes it to Sweden.

Will developed nations have to consume less? Yes. Much less. That may come of its own accord given the Wild West Ponzinomics that rule markets now. All the financial empires that are being made to pay for change are in for a day of reckoning and a severe reversal of fortunes.

Will the developing nations also have to lower aspirations? Yes. How much lower? Well, if they think they are getting to the level of consumerist society they see in Sweden, they had better rethink. Still, with good birth control programs and permaculture design they could get to a steady state balance with the natural world that many in their rural areas are fortunate enough to recall, and that would put them ahead of Sweden in the hard century to come.

Closing takeaways from COP-20: the Chair's final remarks were perilously close to Robert Kennedy's last words, something to the effect of "Now its on to Paris and let's win there." That sent a chill up our spine and we were grateful Mr. Pulgar-Vidal did not exit through the kitchen.

In the Coda — the short comment period after the decision — Mexico made what we thought was one of the better interventions of the two-week ordeal, calling for a re-design of the global economic system, basing it on the reality of climate change and the necessity to disincentivize fossils and incentivize renewables. This was a faint ray of sunlight breaking over the horizon, and we can only hope it leads others to see that systemic change — rearranging economics at its core — is our only real hope.

What was accomplished was much less than a "win" but when you take away the emotional loading from the South and the NGOs, there was progress. 1.5°C is the new 2°C. A mitigation goal of Zero by 2050 (ie: bringing temperature down by ending fossil energy), monitored and adjusted by scientific instrumentation, is now in the sausage hopper with provisions to automatically move the date up if demanded by realities. The full summary and text of Lima is now up on the UN site.

The South's hard-won concessions from the North — adaptation and shared finance (ie.: throwing life preservers to hurricane victims), loss and damage, and development-dependent-delay (differentiation) are all predicated on having booming Western Ponzi economies for the next 30 years. That's like buying beachfront property. It doesn’t matter if it is on the beach in Sweden, it is still on the beach and the beach is vanishing.

When you hit a slots jackpot or have a blackjack run in Vegas they comp you with a room. Then the vultures swoop in, ply you with free drinks, and make sure none of that money leaves the casino. So it was that while innocently standing at the Pentagonito urinals, India was sold 10 nuclear power plants by Russia, just like the ones Russia is building for Bolivia, erstwhile champion of Pachamama and rights of Mother Earth. The cost of a single one of those is likely to be greater than the sum of all the Green Climate Fund pledges to date. India may feel like it will be investing its Green Climate money in carbon-neutral carbon-steel reactors, but it just had its pocket picked and Russia is laughing all the way to the bank.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

The 20th Conference of Parties (#COP20) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (#UNFCCC) got underway this past week in Lima, Peru with a tough assignment. In a mere two weeks, the several hundred delegates will have to to pull together all the threads of all the conversations of these annual two-week junketsfor the past 20 years and produce a consensus document that would become, one year from now, a legally-binding treaty following final negotiations in Paris.There are a lot of loose ends that have to be tied up for that to happen.The first loose end is the ever-expanding gap between science and politics. Ten or more years ago consensus coalesced around a number — 450 ppm — that the science of that time (with more than a few dissenters) said would hold the Earth's fever to just 2°C above Holocene average variations. The 2°C goal became part of the sausage, and with it, the 450 assumption. A couple Decembers ago the parking lot analogy surfaced, wherein the Earth's atmosphere is viewed as having a fixed number of parking spaces for our pollution, call that number 450. If we have filled 400 now, there are still 50 vacant (or about space for 565 billion more tonnes of CO2), and emerging nations like India, China and Brazil can tussle over who gets them.

The Asheninka, who have attended every climatemeeting since Copenhagen, came to Lima to protest the assassinations of their tribespeople who were defending their forests from illegal loggers.

We now know, thanks to Carbon Tracker and Rolling Stone, although the COP delegates have yet to admit, that 450 will take us well above 2°C and, as Bill McKibben will quickly tell you, a better guestimate is 350. Not only are there no remaining parking spaces, 50 cars are double parked and 2 more arrive in search of parking each year (bringing billions of excess tonnes of luggage in the boot that will be left up there for decades to centuries).The Structured Expert Dialogue (#SED)'s 2013-2015 Review was created to address the discrepancy. At the opening of COP20, amid all the hoohah of formal self-congratulatory statements, COP President Vidal stated that the SED is the most important discussion at the conference. If temperature increases are limited to below 1.5°C, there are more chances for adaptation. Even the US, a perennial stick in the mud at these COPs, said on Day 3 that it would be interested in quantifying the differential risk of a world that is 1.5°C warmer versus one that is 2°C warmer. This is like asking how much worse triple parking would be than double parking, when we are standing in a single lane.Of course all of that is just chatter, which is quickly apparent if you step outdoors. The Guardian published an interactive chart that allows people to enter their birthdate and see what kinds of changes can be expected in their lifetimes by projecting present trends forward (remembering that these changes are already baked in the cake, even if emissions are drastically cut). Here is their projection for a 35-year-old today:

This chart is quite a nice advance over the usual hockey sticks, because it makes it personal. What it neglects to do is depict the prospect if, say, the upper boundary is an underestimate and multipliers like Arctic methane, polar albedo, fugitive emissions from fracking, deforestation by heat-stress or other latent tipping points are brought in. It also neglects to mention what happens past mid-century. Correcting the chart for just an additional 50 years (never mind the next 400 while past emissions linger) produces this result:

Another way of representing the dilemma is this cartoon, which uses “Ice-Age Units” (IAUs) to measure the change over the next 86 years. Personally, we think IAUs has a kind of cool, calming feel to it and a better measure might be the Inhofe, named for the Republican climate denier who now chairs the Senate Environment Committee. Let one Inhofe represent the amount of warming beyond which near term human extinction can be assured. Two Inhofes would be just bouncing rubble. With a few possible exceptions, the US just elected 246 Inhofes.According to the latest UNEP Report intended to draw delegates' attention, if we are to stay within the 2°C limit, zero emissions will need to be achieved sometime between 2055 and 2070. For a 1.5°C limit we’d obviously have to bring emissions to zero even faster and also embark on an Apollo-scale program to develop net sequestration.

Next week’s Newsweek cover story says we cangenetically engineer humans to be smaller, with better night vision to live underground (like, say, hobbits).

The SED Review says that there is a need for carbon removal technologies (CDR) in the second part of the century, unless we make a steep change in emissions reductions by 2050. It is obvious to anyone attending these COPs that the final Paris treaty, after being watered down to political acceptability from the thin quinoa gruel being boiled in Lima, will not make a steep change in emissions reductions by 2050. That means CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage), but no-one even knows what CCS is. There are those who think it means expensive artificial trees that suck Earth's atmosphere through amide filters like a charcoal tip on a cigarette. There are others, like Dr. Evil, who think it means geoengineering the planet, and we had best get on with that quickly. And then there are the Regrarians hollering from the back of the room but being drowned out by the clamor for patentable green tech that the solution lies directly below your feet, in the soil, and the atmosphere can be rescued just by a new agricultural revolution, involving nutrient density, holistic management, permaculture, keyline, remineralization, organic no-till, water gardens, compost teas and biochar.

You can't start a fire, worryin' about your little world falling apart This gun's for hire even if we're just dancing in the dark

— Springsteen

More than a little tension in the COP is being generated by the philosophical irreconcilability of voluntarians and enforcitarians. The US and its fossil allies in Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia are for the non-binding pledge system. Europe, Africa and the island states are for legally-binding treaty-enforcement mechanisms. Whether the latter is unobtainable has been the province of game theorists with the counterintuitive conclusion that the sharpest cuts will come from soft pledges, not hard laws. NY Times blogger Andrew Revkin analogizes it to a morphine drip:

The “Will it be enough?” question leads to “What is enough?” I’ve always liked John Holdren’s notion that there’s a sliding mix of “mitigation, adaptation and suffering.” No hard lines going forward. And the learn-and-adjust aspect of humanity’s complex response will keep tweaking the two knobs as necessary.

A high priority for Lima is to put some actual numbers to the finance section in the Paris deal. This will not be easy. So far, pledges to the Green Climate Fund, even after the Xi-Obama deal, are something short of 10 billion, about a third of what developed countries spend exploring for oil and coal each year. UNEP puts the cost of adaptation alone at $150 billion per year during 2025-2030 and $500 billion/year by 2050 (or roughly the pre-delivery price for the Pentagon's latest F35 Lightning-II fighter jets, a.k.a. the Lockheed-Martin Yachtbuyer, with 100 million lines of on-board code and a disconcerting (for NATO combat pilots) inability to “turn, climb or run”). Presumedly the new jets will be needed to protect all the offshore wind-farms and solar arrays being planned as part of Xi-Obama, because they would not stand a chance against a Crimean pilot flying a Сухой Су-35, which can pivot 180° and glide backwards to fire AAMs at pursuers. In the opening sessions of the committee that works on climate finance (do our readers really need yet another acronym?) the US asked that all references to the adequacy, predictability and additionality (UNspeak for double counting of earlier pledges) be removed. That was a bad start, and it has only gone downhill since then. Oz Foreign Minister Julie Bishop announced in advance of her arrival in Lima that Australia would not be contributing to the Green Climate Fund. Australia has replaced its carbon tax with an $AU 2.55 billion slush fund to pay polluters incentives for “low-emission” fossil fuels.A bright spot came on Thursday when the Africa Group introduced a well-structured, concise white paper that covered most of the essential content on finance that needs to be in the Paris Agreement. The Climate Action Network reported:

Some of the provisions that could make it a good starting point for negotiations on the content of the agreement include: the call for a collective quantified finance goal for the post-2020 period that includes a specific amount from public sources; consideration of a range of new sources of finance; a link to the amount of financing needed to achieve the agreed temperature goal; the need for continued scaling up beyond 2020; and primary but not exclusive responsibility of Annex I countries for providing support and finance.

This coming week should demonstrate a quickening pace at the sausage works. The Cumbre de los Pueblos (People’s Summit) will convene from the 8th to the 11th as an open space for non-delegates to attend, get informed, make proposals, and call for urgent action by their governments, who will not be listening but will watch it on the news from plasma screens around the UN venue. The Marcha Mundial en Defensa de la Madre Tierra (People’s March) will take place on the 10th of December with around 15,000 people expected. They're putting Naomi Klein's “blockadia” strategy to a test. Which is more effective at thwarting our extinction: marching in the street listening to bullhorn chants or sitting in air-conditioned halls trying to stay awake while delegates debate subordinate clauses with delays for translation?

“Human beings are like cockroaches. It's fairly easy to kill the first ten percent of the population. And if you try really hard, you might even get the next ten percent. But no matter what you do, you'll never get that last ten percent. We will find a way to survive.”

In his address from New York on December 4th, Ban Ki Moon chided the delegates in Lima to address the need to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, and also to change their approach to “prosperity” to recognize that the strength of an economy is not in gross domestic product but in its impact on ecology, happiness and equality of opportunity. “To respect our planetary boundaries we need to equitably address climate change, halt biodiversity loss, and address desertification and unsustainable land use,” he said. “The stars are aligned for the world to take historic action to transform lives and protect the planet.” The simple fact is, and both those in the halls and those in the streets know this, to stay below 1.5°C, if that were even possible now (and it is technically not), a serious approach might be to phase out all fossil fuels and phase in 100% renewables by 2020 at the latest, and hope that 2°C is still feasible. We'd need to stop all further mining of fossil sunlight, ASAP. That means not only phasing out those absurd subsidies, but marking the assets of the wealthiest and most widely held corporations on the planet to market at considerably lower valuation than current stock price. We'd need to put regrarian mandates into every farm bill in every country. We'd need to close the pre-2020 gap in implementation. We'd need to do all that in Lima, and then ship this sausage to Paris. And then, keep in mind, all of this may still be so much hopium. We may be cockroaches, but even cockroaches are going to have a hard time surviving what lies farther along our present trajectory.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

— Dylan Thomas

We simply cannot adapt to 6°C, and let's be realistic. We are heading that way now, with no sign of turning, slowing or changing direction. If this is humanity's last century, we should not exit wimpering and prevaricating. Have a little dignity. Stop looking for parking. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gentle into that good night.

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The Great Change is published whenever the spirit moves me. Writings on this site are purely the opinion of Albert Bates and are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 "unported" copyright. People are free to share (i.e, to copy, distribute and transmit this work) and to build upon and adapt this work – under the following conditions of attribution, n on-commercial use, and share alike: Attribution (BY): You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non-Commercial (NC): You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike (SA): If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws. Therefore, the content ofthis publication may be quoted or cited as per fair use rights. Any of the conditions of this license can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder (i.e., the Author). Where the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license. For the complete Creative Commons legal code affecting this publication, see here. Writings on this site do not constitute legal or financial advice, and do not reflect the views of any other firm, employer, or organization. Information on this site is not classified and is not otherwise subject to confidentiality or non-disclosure.

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